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    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear"
    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear"
    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear"
    Ebook34 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 12, 2016
    ISBN9781535835299
    A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Anton Chekhov's "The Bear" - Gale

      09

      The Bear

      Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

      1888

      Introduction

      One of Anton Chekhov's minor dramatic works, Medved (The Bear, sometimes translated as (The Boor) was written in 1888 and apparently held in low esteem by Chekhov, who described it as a silly little French vaudeville, as Vera Gottlieb notes in The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov. Yet much of Chekhov's literary income was earned through performances of The Bear and similar plays. Better known for his short stories and longer dramas than for such farces, Chekhov is considered a master of nineteenth-century, Russian realism. (Realism involves an attempt to depict people, environments, and objects as they exist in everyday life.) Even in comic, one-act plays such as The Bear, he vividly depicts details of the everyday lives of common people. The action of such works is driven by the characters and their interactions with one another. In The Bear, a widow, who mourns for her husband seven months after his death, is approached by one of his creditors, a man in dire financial circumstances who desperately requires the money that the widow's husband owed him. The exchange between the widow and the creditor quickly progresses from polite to explosive, and the creditor, who expresses his negative opinion of women in general, is transformed by the spirit with which the widow argues with him. Yet the two agree to duel, and the widow's willingness to meet this challenge compels the creditor to profess his love for her. The play ends with the pair embracing. Despite Chekhov's disparaging remarks about The Bear, it is known from his letters that he took the composition of such plays as seriously as he viewed the writing of his fiction and lengthier dramas.

      Medved was originally published in 1888, in Moscow, Russia, and was later translated as The Bear by Julius West in The Plays by Anton Tchekoff, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1916. The work is also available in The Cherry Orchard & Other Plays, published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1935 and in Plays

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